Remember that Cards Against Humanity-style app, Casts Against Civility, that used Android phones and a Chromecast () to take the game from the table to the television? It turns out the creators of CAH aren’t huge fans of app stores, so they asked the developer of CAC to either remove the app entirely or do away with any CAH related content. Fortunately for us, the developer found a way to both honor the request and keep the game fun.

One of the things that helped make Cards Against Humanity gain traction when it was being Kickstarted was the free nature of the game. If you wanted nicely printed cards from the creators, you could pay your money and get them. If you wanted to download the game from the creators and print the game yourself. This is possible thanks to the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license, which among other things means you can remix and change the app to suit your needs as long as you don’t profit off your creation and you give credit where credit is due.

The Creative Commons license also means you can’t publish your creation somewhere that places additional rules onto that license, which includes the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

When the creator of Casts Against Civility explained on Reddit that he received a request to either pull or modify his app, the users who had already begun to appreciate his work tried to find some loophole that would let the game continue to exist. Instead of looking for a legal answer, Dylan Pollard turned Casts Against Civility into Dehumanize Your Friends. Alongside the name, logo, and font change, the app is now a deep purple instead of the familiar black and white. There’s also explicit language changes for existing game concepts. The person who chooses which card is the best in a round is now the King, and “awesome points” have become “super mega points”. As there are already tons of user-made card packs available on the Internet, the app doesn’t have to rely entirely on Cards Against Humanity cards, but the creators would prefer he not use any of them at all.

The Cards Against Humanity folks explained that “The reason for this policy is that it violates the ‘share alike’ provision of our Creative Commons license; app stores like the Google Play store have their own terms of service and policies that we don’t necessarily agree with,” when asked for clarification on their stance. It’s also vaguely explained in the FAQ on their website.

What is missing from all of this is the actual Play Store or App Store language that they disagree with, but in this case it didn’t seem to matter anyway. Dylan explained that the cards in question never existed in his Android app anyway. This app is designed to pull cards from a server that the owner maintains, which allows the game to grow card packs without updating the app. It also means that the content is following the rules, and as long as the Cards Against Humanity folks agree there should be no further issues.